


Hope You Guess My Name

by nomelon



Series: The Nature of My Game [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Anger, F/M, Hunting, Moral Ambiguity, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-28
Updated: 2011-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:18:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nomelon/pseuds/nomelon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It took John thirteen days to realise he'd been played in the worst way. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope You Guess My Name

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to [The Nature of My Game](http://archiveofourown.org/works/96759) and is in answer to the prompt John/Jo, it was a mistake. Written for the splendid dreamlittleyo.

It took John thirteen days to realise he'd been played in the worst way. He woke up in a forest, naked and cold; his hair tangled and damp with dew, his breath a thick cloud dissipating on the early morning air. There was blood in his mouth, dirt under his nails, and pine needles sticking to his skin. His right shoulder was purpled with a bruise that went right to the bone. He didn't let himself panic. He got his back to a tree, his body curled over his knees, and he counted his breaths, in and out, slow and steady. He kept it up until his heart slowed down and no longer felt like it was trying to hammer its way out of his chest.

It took him half a day to limp back to his motel, dressed in an ill-fitting shirt and damp slacks he'd stolen from a limp clothesline in somebody's backyard. That night he drove back to the middle of nowhere and locked himself in his truck. He woke up to a cracked windscreen and his leather seats torn to shreds and no memory of how any of it happened.

He holed up in a motel room a couple of towns over. He paid with cash, drew the drapes, and sat all day in the dark with a fifth of bourbon in one hand and a gun loaded with silver bullets within easy reach on the bedside table. Two hours before sunset, he caved and got back in his truck, driving with his foot to the floor to the middle of the woods, putting as much distance as he could between himself and civilisation.

What had happened to him was simple; three days a month he became a monster. One of the things he hated; one of the things he hunted.

Jo, that tiny slip of a thing, she did this to him. It was hard to reconcile the act with the pretty girl he'd met, someone he'd thought brave and strong. There had been something about her that had slipped past all his defences and lit him up from the inside, even if they had only been ships passing in the night. Now he felt like a fool, and it hurt more than he cared to admit. The light was gone and there was just a big empty space inside him when he thought about her, a wounded animal in a dark cave that he'd be foolish to go poking at. Righteous animosity warred with an all encompassing numbness that he couldn't seem to shake off. He should have been filled with black rage and the simple urge to hunt her down wiping everything else away, but what he really wanted to know was _why_. He was used to being screwed over. It came with the territory, but this was something that couldn't be undone, something there was no escape from.

He should have known better. Trusting someone enough to let them get that close. Not seeing her for what she truly was, another monster, right under his nose and he never even suspected a thing. And now he was wasting time, licking his wounds and wondering about her motivation when his course of action was clear. He had to find her and he had to bring her down. It was the only choice left to him.

He went back to the scene of the crime and had to duck under the yellow police tape across the doorway to the apartment. The body was gone -- _her name was Lenore_ \-- but the huge bloodstain was still on the carpet, soaked in and gone brown. It turned John's stomach when he realised he could smell it, the scent of blood and death, but more than that, the faint traces of her perfume and the fact that the blood smelled _off_ , and that he could tell straightaway that it wasn't human.

The wronged man in him wanted to burn the place to the ground. The calculating hunter was wondering what forensics were going to make of it when they tested her blood.

Ten minutes of searching yielded the doorway hidden behind the bookcase, undisturbed by whatever law enforcement had been through the apartment. He stood in the tiny windowless room beyond and stared at the heavy-duty cage in the corner, taking in the claw marks on the floor of it, desperate and focused, like something had been trying to dig its way out through the solid metal. There wasn't much else in there, just a small wooden stool by the door and a hook on the wall opposite the cage.

John stood there for a long time, arranging and rearranging the pieces of the puzzle in his head.

The apartment was in Lenore's name but two people had lived there, two females, not quite human, their scents mingled and harmonious. A vampire and a werewolf apparently living together, working together, walking among humans like they belonged there. The deaths in the area, almost but apparently not quite a vampire's MO, always in clusters of three or four, always around the full moon, now that he thought back and checked the dates. The deaths that stopped six months or so back, right around the time Jo had said she'd met Lenore. The key on the chain around Jo's neck, the one she'd toyed with constantly, the one he'd bet a million dollars fit the sturdy lock to the cage in front of him.

The pieces fell into place, too late to do him any good, but at least it was possible that Jo had done this for love, out of some twisted sense of revenge, maybe giving John what she perceived as a taste of his own medicine but without going as far as to actually kill him. John had no clue if that made it better or worse.

 _Joanna Beth_ , she'd said. _But only my mom calls me that._ Calls. Present tense. It hadn't looked to him like she'd been lying, not unless there was even more that he had missed about the girl and she knew how to mask every last one of her tells. John didn't think she was that good. Nobody was that good. So he had a name to go with the face and a mother who was still alive, plus a werewolf who would be new to town and trying to cover her tracks and maybe get her hands on a cage very similar to the one in front of him. It wasn't much to go on, but he'd tracked people down with a lot less.

He gave himself a month to find her, before the next full moon, before he had a tough decision to make.

He found her inside of three weeks, tending bar a couple of states over on the edge of some shitburg town in the middle of nowhere, looking right at home among rough-edged truckers and red-faced drunks. John's kind of place. He didn't quite know what to expect, but he thought, given the choice, that she'd run. She'd stand and face him if she had to, but if she could she'd flee. But she didn't run, she didn't confront him, and didn't seem to have any cavalry to call in. She caught sight of him in the corner booth when she was halfway to somebody's table with a plate of eggs and bacon in one hand and a pitcher of beer in the other. John didn't move, didn't let his expression betray a damn thing, but the second he laid eyes on her his world went a little fuzzy around the edges and she was the only thing still in focus. Jo stopped dead and held his gaze for a long moment, her face pale and serious, then she simply went back to work. She just finished out her shift, not even looking his way again until the last trucker had been pushed out the door at closing time, she bolted the door behind him, and they were alone.

John gave up on the warm beer he'd been nursing all night and stood up, not knowing what on earth to say to her now that she was standing in front of him. He could smell her. He'd had the faint scent of her all evening threaded through the beer and sweat and smoke and perfume, the jumble of scents that humans put out, but now it was just the two of them he could practically taste her on his tongue. The wolf was stirring, just beneath the surface, watching with narrowed eyes, sitting up and taking interest as it recognised one of its own.

Jo untied her grubby apron and tossed it on the bar. "So much for keeping a low profile," she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. "You here for payback?"

 _Yes_ , he wanted to say. _Yes, damn you_. Black and white. A clean kill. No regrets.

"You," he said instead, like the word should be enough to express all the ways that she'd wronged him. "You made me into a goddamn werewolf."

Jo just shrugged; her face carefully neutral. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

He wanted to throttle her. A surge of anger sent him several steps towards her before she flinched, and apparently that was enough to stop him in his tracks. "You did this to me over a _vampire_?" It was abhorrent, and though he'd had weeks to get used to the idea, he still couldn't accept it.

Jo stood her ground, her fists clenched at her sides. "You didn't even _know_ her. She helped me. She was so good."

It was so damn hard to find the right words, to find any words at all, but if there was one thing John was good at, it was being a stubborn son of a bitch. There was no way he was backing down. "Vampires are monsters. Werewolves are monsters. They maim and they kill and they ruin lives. I hunt monsters. I hunt them down and I stop them. That's what I do. That's _all_ I do."

Her breath was coming more quickly, anger and hurt written all over her. "Yeah? Well, guess what, monster hunter. You might want to take a long, hard look in the mirror because your world has just changed."

He was in her space in a heartbeat, gripping her shoulders so tightly he knew he had to be hurting her, knew there'd be bruises. "There's lore," he said, desperate enough that he was choking on it. "I kill the one who turned me and I go back to normal."

Her eyes were shining bright from behind a lock of blonde hair that had fallen in her face, her chin raised and defiant as she laughed at him. "Go ahead. You think we didn't try that? Doesn't work. Nothing works except being chained up come the full moon or--"

"Silver," he said, because god knows he'd thought about it every second of every day since it happened. "Silver would end it."

"You in that much of a hurry to die?" she asked, frowning, like she really cared about the answer.

 _Yes_ , he thought, _anything to make it stop_ , even as he shook his head. "I can't live with this," he said, his voice a wreck. "I can't be this person. I don't know how."

"You learn," she said simply, seriously, driving him crazy with her calm certainty. It was madness, thinking this was something that could be tamed, that it was something he could live with.

He was having trouble keeping eye contact, his gaze straying to her cheek, her mouth, the dip of her collarbone just above the line of her shirt. Having her right here, the feel of her, vibrant and alive under his touch, the damnable defiance in the line of her jaw, it hit him right in the centre of his chest, making it hard to breathe.

"I don't want to learn. I don't want it inside me. You did this to me. You made me into this thing. And for what?"

"You killed my girlfriend, you asshole." She started to struggle, trying to break free from his hold on her. She was surprisingly strong, but then so was he.

"I thought I was saving your life!"

"She was never going to hurt me."

It was a joke. The whole thing was some kind of sick joke. His choice should have been simple. Not easy, maybe, but simple. The last thing he should have been doing was letting her back into his space, listening to what she had to say, letting himself get pulled in again like they were attached by an invisible thread, and worst of all, feeling the itch of _wolf_ under his skin. He had to get some distance between them, get some perspective. He may have been a monster, a dead man walking, but nothing else had changed. It couldn't. He didn't know any other way.

"What about all those people you hurt? The ones you killed?"

It was then that her bravado faltered and she looked smaller suddenly, guilt hanging heavy on her. "I know what I am. I didn't then. And now I know how to take care of it and make sure that never, ever happens again. Because she showed me how."

"You'll have to excuse me if I'm having a little trouble swallowing the fact that a goddamn vampire showed you how not to kill people."

She looked him right in the eye, unwavering. "She did. And you killed her. What does that make you?"

It was John's turn to falter, because if what she was telling him was true... then nothing made a damn bit of sense anymore and John's sense of duty, everything he believed in, it had all just gone to shit.

"How was I supposed to know that? I didn't know."

"You didn't take the time to _find out_."

"So why did you sleep with me?" he asked, the words just falling out of him before he'd even processed that he was going to say them, hating that his skin flushed hotly at the mention of it. He could see that he'd hit a nerve, her mouth opening but no words coming. "There must have been some other way to-to-to... infect me, if that was your plan."

"I didn't have a plan. I just... I just wanted..."

She reached up and touched his face, making him jolt like she had thousands of volts at her fingertips. He distantly realised that she wasn't struggling any longer and he wasn't holding her in place so much as simply holding her. He had to drag his gaze away from her mouth.

"You wanted to punish me, right? Wanted me to see how the other half lives?"

"Something like that," she said, sounding sullen.

"And you had to take me into your bed to do it?"

"I never said that I was--"

"And then you turn tail and run, not even waiting around to see the results of your handiwork."

"I wasn't exactly planning on sticking around and playing happy families until the full moon."

His anger returned in a rush and he shook her, just once, anything to mask the way his hands were trembling.

"You destroyed me," he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

"I _hated_ you," she hissed, grabbing fistfuls of his jacket, pulling him down to meet her in a kiss.

His back hit the wall behind him and it was all he could do to hold on, kissing her back fiercely, his hands tangled in her hair. She pushed his jacket back off his shoulders, too impatient to deal with buttons, just shoving his shirt up to give her access to skin so she could rake her nails over his chest. He sucked in a breath and grabbed at her wrists, not missing the way her eyes flared at the contact.

"This isn't..." he said, floundering, burning up with the urge to get his hands on her and relearn every part of her, shaken by how much he wanted it. "You weren't supposed to... This wasn't why I came here."

"Liar. This was definitely why you came here." She pushed her mouth against his, cutting him off, distracting him with her lips and tongue, her biting kiss, the heat of her breath in his mouth. John was lost, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in close. "I thought about you," she whispered, her forehead pressed against his, her hands working frantically at his belt. "I thought about you lying there sleeping and I felt sick thinking about what I'd done. I wasn't sure if you'd--"

"Shut up, shut up, shut _up_ ," he growled, because it would all be so much easier if he could just hate her.

He flipped them, crowding her up against the wall, swallowing down the guttural sound of pleasure she made. She shoved her hands between them, loosening his jeans just enough to push them down over his hips, burning his skin in her haste. He ran his hands up her thighs, under the short skirt she was wearing, hooked her panties to one side and found her hot and swollen for him.

"Oh, god, John, _please_."

He gave her exactly what she wanted, pushing inside, watching her closely as her eyes went wide and her breath stuttered around a moan. No condom, and it was reckless and stupid, but right at that moment he couldn't have cared less. Jo got it together before he did, twisting her hips, urging him on, arching off the wall as he fucked into her. He pushed his face into the curve of her throat, giving her everything he had, all his hurt, all his fear, all his want, and Jo took it all and asked for more. She cried out as she came, her body tight and hot around him. John took hold of her hips and fucked into her a dozen more times before he was coming too, deep inside her, his muscles singing, the scent of what they'd done rich and heady enough to make his head spin.

He couldn't stop touching her, unwilling to even pull out. He buried his face in her throat, relishing the taste of her, the silk of her hair, not wanting to acknowledge the part of him that wanted to sink his teeth into her, to curl up with her and never let go. He worried at the soft skin of her throat and she tensed at the first touch of his teeth, but he didn't bite down. He sucked a bruise into her skin, wanting to brand his touch on her, wanting there to be evidence of what they'd done.

She pushed him away with soft touches and the flex of her thighs around his hips. She held her breath as he slid out of her, and wriggled out of his hold to stand on unsteady legs. She looked so young and unsure of what came next.

"This wasn't why I came here," he said again, but had no idea if he believed it. It was hard to think clearly, the warm contentment in his bones not enough to dull the hunger thrumming just under his skin, a restlessness that hadn't quite been satisfied. His hands already felt too empty, his skin prickling at her presence.

She huffed in annoyance, tugging her skirt down. "Keep telling yourself that." She led him by the hand to the bar, and grabbed two cold beers, handing him one and sitting on the stool next to him.

John took a long swallow, the beer crisp and welcome on his tongue. "You can see how you blowing hot and cold like this could confuse a man." He toyed with his beer and resisted the urge to flat out apologise; resisted the urge to give her the 'the only good monster is a dead monster' speech because, honestly, he was still working through that one. "Jo, you know I never meant to... I was only trying to do right."

"I know it," she said. "What I did to you..." She took a slug of her beer and rubbed at her forehead, unhappiness in the line of her mouth. "I was kind of running on autopilot. I shouldn't have done what I did." John figured that maybe he wasn't the only one who was lousy at apologies. "Are we good?" she asked, wincing at the inadequacy of the question.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I have no fucking clue." He hated himself for his next question because it felt too much like acceptance of the situation when, in fact, he had no idea what came next. "Does it work?" he asked, and has to clarify when she slanted him a look. "The cage. Locking yourself away. Does it actually work?"

"I'm zero for eight. Those sound like pretty good odds to me." Jo dangled her beer from her fingertips, her face hidden by her hair. "I can show you, if you want. I've found a place here that could work. Out in the woods. Private. No neighbours. It's kind of perfect for... you know. I mean, I'm not asking you to... But if you need a place for the full moon. We can work it out. I can do that for you."

Without looking at him, she inched closer, her bare knee brushing his thigh. John abandoned his beer on the bar, picked her up and set on his lap, in close and personal.

"I don't know what I'm doing here," he said softly. "This doesn't make any sense." He kissed her, his hands on her face, and she met him halfway. The kiss was slow, but deep and hungry and dirty. Kind of perfect, really. He smoothed his thumbs over her cheeks, dizzy with how much he wanted her. "You and me. This thing between us. Is it a wolf thing?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe it's just an us thing."

"That's a hell of a fucked up beginning."

She leaned in, her breath warm and sweet over his lips. "That's kind of how my beginnings seem to go."

John closed his eyes and let himself believe.

**Author's Note:**

> <http://nomelon.livejournal.com/203836.html>


End file.
